Für Luīze
I am reading, writing and answering emails, until I get tired of it. I decide to make a phone call to my gallery friend I. (to catch-up). She’s been in the business for a long time (unlike me). She will take part in that one art fair, in which I have just declined my participation. She tells me: “I do it” and further, “because I always sell there”. I hang up the phone and start walking. Later I run into V. and tell her about my phone call with I. V says: “Do your thing” or “stay true to yourself” or something like that. I make a second phone call to reach M. M. is a very good listener (and artist). She asks cautiously: “Maybe you can make the rules?”. I ask: “Do you feel any pressure to perform (Leistungsdruck)?” M. wants to think about it before giving me an answer. I hang up and go home.
Alexandra-Maria Toth

Home. Vienna, 5th district, Reinprechtsdorferstraße Nr. 48.The entrance to your apartment is framed by the shopping streets store signs, read from left to right: Kaufpunkt (1) and Anker (2) continuing with Yummy noodles (a restaurant where you assume Gregor S. lives and just like his family you are revolted by the thought of Gregor S.’ nearby presence) and Trend Time to the right. Looking at the row of houses, there is a clear visual line between the shopping streets windows and the repetitive gray facades of the typical Viennese residential buildings, demarcating the border between the public and the private. The shop's signs transgress this line, on the height of the first floors they are installed in an eerie offset on the pallid plastering of the after-work. You draw together your curtains at night. In the dark you find yourself half waking from wet, lucid dreams about a vanished twin carrying out the acts you and your artist friends are too weak to perform (3): In one dream, she finally withdraws from productivity altogether. In another, she manages to set an end to her unemployment era. First floor, door 9 - A. One day you return to work to find Gregor S. lying dead in the middle of your living room. He has traversed the house's invisible network running through its walls and ended up in your private space. “He doesn’t inhabit your place; he just comes here to die” artist friend Q. says to you. This dead body is the core evidence to you that this house's walls are just as permeable as anything: anything can seep through its supposedly rigid structure. After Gregor's death, the shop signs start to penetrate this previously intact facade, breaking up the concrete walls and lighting up the entirety of your living room with their shrill light. As the cracks widen, the doors to your apartment spring half open like a reluctant invitation (4). Like the weak subject you are, you take the path of least resistance and accept every invitation, leave no half-opened door unchecked. You do your work, even if you’d love to tell them you said no and decline participation. Yes, you do definitely get tired of things. Later, very tired, when the opening has closed, the invited gather with you vis-a-vis, Reinprechtsdorferstraße 29, on street level. Inside, in a sinister mood your guests come to observe the most literal form of non-work. Perverse attraction to authentic figuration: breathing the same air, consuming the same beer as the long-term unemployed and those working for real. Cohabitation of spaces some artist friends would call it, gentrification others. Merely the glorified representatives of the outside world call it nothing, shouting at their sensationalist spectators, “This isn’t your scene. Get the fuck out of here.” You do.


Luisa Berghammer
(1) consumption point
(2) anchor
(3) Site of crime: your mother’s womb. As the vanished twin simply disappears, the leftover twin will forever feel insufficient and the need to archive for two.
(4) A gust of wind howling through your apartment brings a funny, too familiar sounding voice to your ear: “Isn’t this text a bit hermetic? Isn't it a lot of words for an author who’s simply frustrated about not getting a job?”.